What tests can I do at home to identify any metal? Regarding a question on another Stack Exchange site which identifies a weighted Lego brick to be some kind of metal, I wanted to know how to identify a metal, perhaps limited to household objects like scales or a bowl of water to measure volume. 
 A: *

*Your big problem is that metallic alloys are so numerous that it very hard to do in general.

*Your big advantage is that people mostly use things that are common, easy to get and cheap.
This is especially true for something as mundane as a weight. Who's going to spend a lot of money sourcing something unusual? (Special case answer, when you need a lot of weight in a small space you might pay for tungsten.)

If I was tackling the problem in general I'd start with a simple visual inspection and then check the two properties that zerphy suggests in a comment are (density and magnetic character), and possibly ductility. They are easy to check with tools you'll find around any lab (and indeed around many houses). 
As often the surface can be coated (e.g. hot-dip galvanizing) you can try scratching of a bit with sandpaper to see if the bulk material is different from the surface material. Many metals can be distinguished by their color already if you have a clean and polished surface. 
At this point you should be able to sort out iron, steel (may not be magnetic and may be denser than iron), copper, aluminum, silver, lead, gold, bronze and brass. 
(Note that telling one steel from another beyond stainless versus high-carbon versus other is not easy outside of a materials laboratory.)
If you are still stumped consider slightly exotic things like pewter, nickel, cobalt-steal{#}, titanium{+}, tungsten{#}, platinum, electrum, zinc, tin, and magnesium. Many of these have useful properties like extreme surface hardness (so taking a steel file to the sample could be useful) or unusually high or low density (which you would already know). Tin has a very low melting point. Magnesium of course burns easily and brilliantly (to the point of posing a significant hazard).
I suppose might encounter copper-berylium, but I'm not sure what you'd use to ID it beyond it's distinctive appearance.
After than you may want to take it to an expert.

{#} I've seen men's jewelry made of this stuff in recent years. Very spiffy.
{+} Increasingly available in consumer products. The body and band of my watch are titanium: it feels as light as a toy.
